Art & Culture | “A Theology of Making” with Makoto Fujimura
Shownotes:
Chris is joined by contemporary artist Makoto Fujimura, author of Art + Faith: A Theology of Making. His book explores the role of creativity in the spiritual life, and it draws upon quiet disciplines such as awareness and waiting. The meditative space that Fujimura creates for prayer and praise breaks open new avenues to seek the never-ending depths of God’s beauty and grace. Sophisticated and intellectual, Fujimura’s art has been praised as a vehicle for hope, healing, redemption, and refuge.
Fujimura explains how the power, mystery, and depth of art drive us to ask deeper questions. He introduces his spiritual discipline of “slow art,” speaks to the nuances of tradition, and ponders the ways art can liberate us in our cultural context. Fujimura gives us space to identify where we meet Jesus in both making and consuming. This conversation speaks to the healing gift of art as culture care, rather than a commodity.
Series Info:
Christians spend a lot of time talking about what is true or exploring goodness, but we do not spend as much time exploring beauty, aesthetics, and the arts. In a world full of content curated to our specific taste, we need more time and space to fill our souls with the kind of art that breaks open our curiosity and makes us come alive. Where does God meet us in the beauty of our imagination? How does art and culture shape our desires and longings?
In this series “Art and Culture,” we’ll talk about imagination, memory, culture making, and memoir writing. We will have three guests guide us through the relationship between art, faith, life, story, trauma, healing, place, and nature. We pray that these conversations allow breathing room for deeper introspection, greater awareness of the natural world, and space to explore the depths of the imagination.
Resources:
Follow Makoto Fujimura on the web:
Check out Makoto Fujimura’s book Art and Faith: A Theology of Making here:
https://culturecarecreative.com
Learn more about Makoto Fujimura’s art here:
https://www.waterfall-gallery.com/makoto-fujimura
Read Makoto Fujimura’s biography here:
https://imagejournal.org/artist/makoto-fujimura/
Follow Mako on social media:
https://www.facebook.com/makotofujimuraart
https://twitter.com/iamfujimura
Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 0:00
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. Today I am without my co-host Eddie Rester today. And he'll be back I guess next week. But today I'm talking to Makoto Fujimura, who has recently released a new book, out last year called "Art and Faith: a Theology of Making." Mako is a career painter trained in an ancient Japanese style of painting. He talks a lot about his journey into becoming an artist and kind of the way he uses materials, the way that he has rhythms and rituals for his work on a daily basis.
Chris McAlilly 0:44
He talks about his art as being slow art. And that comes through in the podcast. He talks about the ways in which he attempts to kind of slow down with the materials, with the natural world, and with his work. He's currently working on a project that is 14 years long, in which he is painting one painting on each of the 150 Psalms. It's a collaboration with a biblical scholar, Ellen Davis, and he talks a little bit about about that work.
Chris McAlilly 1:16
He also talks about some of the problems in our culture, specifically American culture. He talks about the culture wars and the antidote to that being artists who are border stalkers, who work at the edges of polarization and move between different tribes, to attempt to care for culture in different ways and also to heal certain things. He talks as well about the problem of pragmatic utilitarianism. In other words, the ways in which all of our time and our energy is geared towards usefulness. And we don't have enough spaces in our lives, our daily lives and in our culture to waste time in creative ways and in ways that would allow us to meditate and contemplate on the beauty of creation.
Chris McAlilly 2:10
He talks as well about his unique journey into the Christian faith. He came to Christian faith late later in life, and it came through engagement with paintings of William Blake and the writings of John Milton and other and other Christian artists. He talks about the the energy and the flow that he felt always, even as a little boy. When he created it, was something that he he didn't really enjoy talking about in public because he didn't know that other people didn't exactly have the same experience, but that flow that he felt he was able to connect later in life, to the Gospels and to Christ and to the Holy Spirit. He gets into all of that, and for me, this conversation is a nice wrap to the last several episodes from Jamie Smith to Kyese Laymon and Aimee Nezukumatathil.
Chris McAlilly 3:07
The arts for me have always been a way to expand my imagination for what's possible. And also they've given me a way into a deeper dimension in my faith. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And if you did, share it with someone in your network, or in your family, or among your friends who you think would also enjoy it. Thanks for joining us as always, at The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 3:34
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 3:40
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 3:43
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:51
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 4:03
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 4:18
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 4:20
It's a pleasure today to have Mako Fujimura on the podcast, welcome, Mako.
Makoto Fujimura 4:26
Great to be here.
Chris McAlilly 4:28
I am loving your book that you put out this year or last year, "Art and Faith: a Theology of Making," and one of the things that I learned in the book is that you have a journey into becoming an artist and that kind of precedes a journey into faith. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you became an artist.
Makoto Fujimura 4:50
Right. I have a painting that I did when I was two and a half, was something like that. My mother kept this painting. I was born in Boston, and my father is a well-known scientist. He was doing his work in Stockholm, at the time, in Sweden. And I painted this image. And my mother kept this image, which is, you know, rather abstract painting that you would imagine a two and a half year old painting. But it has exactly the same colors and the gesture as I used today. And it's also almost a perfect painting in the sense that it's completely free of ego. And my mother saw something in this because she kept it and framed it and gave it to me for my college graduation.
Chris McAlilly 5:49
What an amazing gift.
Makoto Fujimura 5:51
Yeah, and I gave it back to her when she went into her nursing home, and when she passed away, I got the painting back. So a refrain that I have as I'm going out from my house to the studio, I look at it every day, I remind myself, "This is my goal," you know, I have this kind of freedom and joy in painting. And, you know, that tells a lot about my upbringing. My mother was an educator, who had several artists in her family. She would always tell me about them and how hard it was for them to be an artist and a playwright, but very unusual for a Japanese, you know, well-educated family. And so I think, to me, I was always an artist. And I was very fortunate to grow up in a home where that was valued.
Chris McAlilly 6:54
Tell me, you mentioned your studio. And one of the things that I learned in your book is that you're very intentional about kind of the rhythms and rituals and liturgies of your work in your studio. Talk a little bit about that, about your life as an artist, kind of what does that look like? You wake up in the morning, you move into your studio at some point. Talk through some of those rhythms and rituals and how they've shifted through the years.
Makoto Fujimura 7:20
Yeah, I find my studio experience to be very sacred. It's the most... the closest I ever felt to God is creating in my studio. And I live in a farm in Princeton, a horse farm, a converted horse farm. And so you do feel connected to the earth and surrounding, and you sense the rhythm of nature. And you're, you know, you're connected that way, semi-isolated, so I felt like the quarantine wasn't that bad for me.
Makoto Fujimura 8:12
I go in very early in the morning. I, the way I work, I call it slow art, but it takes quite a bit of time to prepare to paint. So whether it be melting this Japanese hard glue or preparing Sumi ink, which is ink block made from paints that you rub against some stone and water and create this calligraphy ink, it takes about an hour to create something, so you're always preparing to paint. And so the first thing I do in the morning nowadays is too intentionally use these materials that slow me down. And I have been going through the Psalms. I started to do this about two years ago, where I decided I will take one psalm per month and read it every day and work on a painting, one painting a month, 48 inches by 48 inches. So it's it's fairly large.
Makoto Fujimura 9:28
And I spent time creating these slow materials. And then my dear friend, Dr. Ellen Davis at Duke, heard about this project, which is going to take me about 14, 15 years to complete, you know, because 150 Psalms, one per month. So I didn't realize it will take me so long but you know, but once I embarked on it, I couldn't go back. And so she has been kindly translating afresh each of the Psalms for me. She's a Hebraic scholar, and she understand the poetic nuances of the Psalms. So she's been translating. And then one of my fellows, who is a spoken artist, a spoken-word artist as well as a painter, she's been recording these Psalms that Ellen translates. And so I, nowadays I listen to Julia's voice reading the Psalms that Ellen translated, and then I start my day, working on the psalm painting.
Chris McAlilly 10:52
That is amazing. And the layers of engagement with the text, and I want to come back to this movement towards towards faith that the current project and work that kind of, I want to put a pin in that and come back to it, but I want to go back and ask you about kind of how you spend the day and the materials that you're working with, because it's a very unique way of engaging in the practice of art, and I know that it emerges out of this tradition of which you understand yourself to be a part, going back to kind of Japanese culture and the practices of art that emerge out of a particular time and place. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that.
Makoto Fujimura 11:38
Yes, so I grew up biculturally, bilingually, biculturally, so I didn't really feel like I fit into any other cultures. And yet, I went back to Japan as a graduate student to study nihonga, traditional Japanese style paintings. And with that you're using, you're learning to use the materials that they used in 17th century, 16th century Japan, which are pulverized minerals and Sumi ink and paper and silk and gold and so forth. So, I was very fortunate as a national scholar to study under several masters of this lineage program that harkens back to 16th century, 15th, 16th century. And I am literally still the only outsider permitted to be part of a doctoral level, basically a lineage mentoring program.
Makoto Fujimura 12:45
And I came back to US, my art is contemporary. And so I came back to US with this deep understanding of Japanese culture, and especially of 16th and 17th centuries and then I continue to use the materials modified, I use both space age materials and now digital technology with nihonga. But nevertheless, you know, what I'm trying to do is to make alive the tradition in a new way and obviously to honor what came before me but also innovate and express something that is deeply connected with the earth as well because I'm using pulverized minerals, malachite, azurite, you know, Earth materials, but then so lovingly, and carefully by Japanese artisans that prepare them, that I see it as I am part of a ecosystem of these crafts folks, for generations, that made paper and so can prepare pigments. And I am you know, I see myself collaborating in that sense, in that ecosystem.
Chris McAlilly 14:18
I was struck by that part of the book where you talk about nihonga, the Japanese style of painting. One of the... you have a sentence or two here that just captured my attention: "I've come to believe that nihonga is part of this historical ecosystem of care and nurture of culture that the Japanese have cultivated for more than 1000 years, an integrated way of making that affirms the beauty of nature." I just found that so, so interesting to think that you know, there's one painting that you're doing, one per month at this point, but to think of that as being a part of a thousand-year cultural tradition, of an ecosystem of care and nurture, and nurture of culture. What do you mean by--I think I know what you mean--but what do you mean by the "nurture of culture?"
Makoto Fujimura 15:16
Yeah, so I wrote a book called "Culture Care," which was two books back. It's a compilation of essays that I've written since the mid-2000s, when I was advocating for culture, and we were doing this advocacy work with National Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts. I was appointed by President Bush to be part of this as an artist volunteering to help US arts find its thriving. And we were in the midst of, and still are, they in the midst of cultural war rhetoric. And, in fact, I think back then it was heightened by this sense of inner polarization that we were starting to see happen.
Makoto Fujimura 16:12
And, you know, resulting reality today is untenable, because of the various ways that each side has demonized the other and so forth. But as an artist, you know, you get conscripted into the frontlines of cultural wars. You're asked to fight these ideological battles, whether you're on the left or on the right. And we are rather uncomfortable doing that, first of all, because art is fundamentally not something... Propaganda is something that is meant to search and ask deeper questions that the main media circuit would allow.
Makoto Fujimura 16:12
So, you know, when I was advocating, I started to use the word "culture care," rather than "culture wars." And I wrote a book about it. And at the end of the book, I thought about translating this into Japanese and found myself not being able to do it. And the reason was that the Japanese culture is culture care. So you can't really talk about you know, bird flying, you know, it can't really talk about the aerodynamics. Flight, you know. And so Japanese culture is all about caring for culture and nurturing, connecting nature to culture, and it's integrated that way.
Chris McAlilly 17:44
I think one of the experiences that reframed my understanding of culture and what a culture is, and the way in which a culture affects you in ways that are both conscious and unconscious, is when in college, I traveled abroad and studied abroad in Spain, in southern Spain, for... I was there for six months. And I remember, just, I mean, there's so many different things about Spanish culture. There are the rhythms of time and the way in which, you know, food is handled. And, you know, it was the first time I realized that what my father drinks is, like, you know, brown water, it's not coffee. Real coffee is something different. You know, and sorry, dad, if you're listening to this, I apologize, but it's not real coffee.
Chris McAlilly 18:29
And, but I think just, you know, moving outside of the culture of your origin to actually gain some perspective on it was a really interesting exercise for me, and I came to see certain things with a heightened sense of importance and beauty. I mean... I've lived most of my life in the American South. And part of it is the rhythm of the seasons and the certain smells and foods that gained a heightened sense of importance for me when I was not able to experience them. For Thanksgiving, for instance, is a big cultural moment for us that
Makoto Fujimura 19:10
Yeah
Chris McAlilly 19:11
that became even more important to me. And then, you can also see when you're outside of your culture of origin, some of the some of the things that, you know, might be less than ideal things that might, you would you would intend... that are actually broken and need not only restoration, healing, regeneration, kind of revision, whatever you might want to see. So I think it's interesting that you... How would you... The time that you spent in Japan learning to be an artist in this way, I guess what did you learn, thinking back of being a person that's kind of bicultural, but then, you know, growing up in America and then kind of coming back, what did you see, I guess, from Japan about kind of American culture?
Makoto Fujimura 20:00
Yeah, so that's that's the interesting part, you know, bicultural person gets to be exiled from both sides, right, and you are able to be objective about both sides, and creates a, I think a perfect climate for being an artist. without so always border stalkers and they they don't fit into normal homogeneous tribal patterns, but they're very good at meandering in between the borderlands and even going into another tribe and then understanding the language and culture and bringing, you know, they can be an ambassador or messenger to both sides, if they develop that skill.
Makoto Fujimura 20:44
And I then spy very well-meaning people to do a nihonga workshop, you know, teach us how to do nihonga. And I tried for a while and then I finally started to say, you know, really, you really have to go to Japan and immerse yourself in the culture to understand nihonga. It's not a technique. It's not just, you know, figuring out how to mix the pigments. It really is about the ecosystem of care. So I think those things, you know, when you are immersed in them, if you ask a typical Japanese, even nihonga artists, I don't think that person will be able to articulate in a way that I can of the specific nuances and beauty of Japanese tradition.
Makoto Fujimura 21:35
And same thing can be said for America. You know, the reason why I think I was asked to serve on National Council was because of my so many years of promoting democracy at work, you know. And I have such a high regard for expression, especially everything from freedom of expression issues, to a lot of the conservative issues, you know, pro-life issues and issues that really we, you know, we have branded them in certain ideological ways. But to me, they are all about cultural thriving, and how can we liberate people from their bondage to the [...], you know, and in order to do that, you have to have artists being able to not only express freely, but but also artists who lead in their care for culture. And those are things that, you know, largely, we don't talk about, you know. We don't cultivate the next generation of artists who care for culture, you know, in schools. That's not something we talk about. So.
Chris McAlilly 22:56
That's a fascinating idea that you would have as a part of kind of the formal public education, a, you know, a way of instructing children in the care of culture as an important civic, you know, duty or obligation. I think that's fascinating. I love this idea that you talked about in the book, and that you mentioned, that an artist, when operating at kind of the hilt, or at their best, is a border-stalker, between. And that's particularly meaningful at a time of cultural polarization that you need characters to be border stalkers.
Chris McAlilly 23:34
You also talk about, you know, I find it interesting, the way in which you diagnose the problems of our culture, and part of it to polarization and culture war. But this other dimension that you kind of hint at when you talk about folks who want you to come in and teach nihonga as if it were a technique is this other dimension, and you are very, very aware of it. It seems to me that you're, I mean, you actually talked about this in the book as being your work as an antidote to this other dimension of our, I guess, cultural depravity, which would be a kind of pragmatic utilitarianism. Could you talk about that? Why are you so... How have you become so aware of that as a problem for us? And just talk about what you mean by by that.
Makoto Fujimura 24:26
Yeah, I talk about Lewis Hyde, H-Y-D-E, book called "The Gift," it's called. It's a simple title, but a profound book. Lewis Hyde is a poet, and he wrote this book, to really try to explain why poets are needed in capitalistic societies. He talks about the gift economy, being having an independent realm than the typical capitalistic society. But what's interesting, so, the arts are fundamentally a gift. It's not a commodity. And anytime you try to make it into a commodity, which you can, obviously in the marketplace, you lose something of the essence of what the poet is trying to do. And that can be said, too, of music and theater and art in general.
Makoto Fujimura 25:27
And what's interesting about Lewis Hyde's book is that he is not saying, you know, like, remove yourself from the world. He is actually saying that a capitalistic thriving requires the gift economy operating at the center of it. Otherwise, you don't have the kind of expansive vision that at least American entrepreneurial capitalism has allowed. So creativity and imagination is something that needs to be cultivated. And in order to do that, well, you have to preserve a pure gift economy, at the heart of capitalism.
Makoto Fujimura 26:09
So when I talk about utilitarian pragmatism becoming the sole way that we understand ourselves, and this is true, theologically as well, because, you know, I know that Christian theology depends on what theologians call the safety of God, which means God stands outside of time and space, and God does not need us or the creation to exist. God stands before even that, even the word "before" isn't right, God stands outside of this. So that means that, you know, in order for God to create anything, He has to be because of love. And it is, you know, biblical theology tells us that it is that same love that holds the world together. So, to me, God exists in that prism, you know, that God being the artist, perhaps, as I note in the book, the only artist, true artist, right. And so we are free, on this side of eternity, to base our making out of love and mercy and beauty for the world.
Makoto Fujimura 27:24
But yet, we have turned that into commodity. That instinct is turned into a commodity to gain power and control power. And that is really the opposite of how... So that's why artists are struggling, you know. I'm overlooking the Hudson River today, in my apartment, and Hudson is the greatest estuary, one of the greatest estuary ecosystem in the world. And when the Hudson was polluted, you know, oysters died and the striped bass stop coming. And because of the cleanup in the 70s, the Hudson is now a little bit better. And there are three medium striped bass that go up in the spring, pretty soon, in May, they will be going up to up the river to spawn, and that kind of vitality is what culture needs, is estuaries, the most diverse ecosystem, most complex and most delicate, if you have to protect the estuary for the entire ecosystem to thrive.
Makoto Fujimura 28:37
And so I, you know, overlap with culture, cultural history, which is New York City, you know, which is in Los Angeles, which is all the cities. Cultural histories are vital for the economy and the nations to thrive. And yet, we are exiling these artists just as we have polluted the waters. We have polluted a cultural river, and artists are having a hard time. They they are forced to be bottom-dwellers and survive, when they should be swimming upstream like trout, you know, swimming and in the most pristine, beautiful waters.
Chris McAlilly 29:23
I earlier in my life, I worked in a in a publishing house and it was a religious publishing house. And you know, it was a denominational publishing house, and the denomination and the publishing house both were at a period of time when they were suffering. And I remember going to the the library at this publishing house of, it was the sacred texts, the old books, right, the ones that no longer had any commercial value, and I remember walking around in there and experiencing, you know, mold and must and decay and later I went to university, I went to seminary at Emory University, and one of the things that became immediately clear that the tallest building at Emory is the Woodruff Library.
Chris McAlilly 30:15
And I remember going to the highest floor of the highest building at Emory, and that was where they kept the sacred texts, the sacred, you know, that's where Flannery O'Connor's letters are. And that's where they keep all of their most sacred books, and they're pristinely cared for, etc. And you can see from the top of, you know, can go out on the balcony and see over the canopy of Atlanta. And it just struck me. It was just such a vivid image of what happens when you commoditize any aspect of your culture, but specifically religious culture and what can be, you know, when you hold what is sacred in high regard. I want to shift the conversation, because we've been talking about your work as an artist. But the other side of it, and this is informing how you think of your work as an artist. So we've already been talking about it a little bit, but I want to talk a little bit about your faith. You say in the book, you were introduced to Christianity later in life. Could you talk about your introduction to Christianity?
Makoto Fujimura 31:27
Sure.So I call my journey of faith, instead of saying "conversion story," I say it's my "inversion story." Because I felt, very early on in my life, that there was this gift flowing through me and even what I painted, the painting when I did two and a half, I don't remember painting it. But many times later on, when I would make something, something would flow right through me and I knew it wasn't mine. You know, and I thought everybody had this experience, you know, until I went to middle school, and I tried to talk about it. It's just not something that you talk about, you know, in public.
Makoto Fujimura 32:19
And, but, so I kind of want to keep quiet about this, but I've always felt there was something other that transcended my being and that this energy was flowing right through me when I created something. And when I began to hear the voice of Christ through literature, was through William Blake, actually, Milton and many of the paintings of El Greco, and Georges Rouault, and so many others. But when I began to connect the voice of Christ to that experience, it perfectly made sense to me, that that voice of Christ that I read in the gospels, resonated so perfectly, matched up so perfectly with this experience of this charge that was flowing through me. And so I was actually delighted that I finally found where it came from, and that this Creator God, the maker, biblical understanding of God is, you know, so much, so, so much about my own experience early on.
Makoto Fujimura 33:46
So I inverted into my faith, and that, you know, when I read the Bible, through and through several times, first few years that I, you know, I wanted to confirm what it was that I was hearing. And ever since I've been writing this book, I think, because there's been so many instances of reading a particular passage of scripture and saying, really resonating and saying, "That's it. That's, that's the voice I heard." And it just is so exhilarating when you have that connection.
Makoto Fujimura 34:35
So I, again, I would write about these things in private because, you know, I go to church and talk about Exodus 31, days are all holy, I'm creating the mercy-seat, and how two and a half cubits and one and a half cubits... It's so fascinating, it's, I can, you know, I can literally make it. I can see it. And in my mind's eye, it perfectly resonates with the redemptive act of God to send Jesus, you know, so that the mercy-seat, you know, one and a half by two and a half, half indicating mercy, you know, God has to fill the other half.
Makoto Fujimura 34:35
And so really, we are waiting for the Messiah to come and that person, whoever this is, has to give himself as the ultimate sacrifice. It's all in there in Exodus, and, you know, I go to church and talk about this and people are like, "What? What are you talking about? Those are just numbers." You know, "I skipped over that part. It doesn't make sense," you know. So I kept these thoughts and notes for myself. And then, so, theology making book is my life's work, and it's actually 1/3 of what I have written. We compressed that for the sake of, you know, as an introduction to this idea.
Chris McAlilly 36:06
That's just beautiful. And one of the things that I hear in that is this sense that it originated with you, with this experience that you have when you were creating, that there was a gift flowing through you. One of my favorite parts of the book is where you talk about pipe theology and the way in which Christians, we often talk about fixing the pipes, and we don't talk about what the pipes are for, why there are pipes in the first place. And then what it is that, I guess, the theological content that you've come to see is, you know, the spirit flowing through us, or the blood of Christ flowing through us, or the power of new creation flowing through us, could you talk a little bit about that? I thought it was such a powerful image.
Makoto Fujimura 36:52
With all respect to plumbers, I'd say, you know, that we often preach plumbing theology, which is, you know, you go to church, and you get tools to fix your pipes, and then you learn how to use them in Sunday school, and you come home and you fix your pipes, and you go back, and they give you another tool next week. And, you know, and all you're asked to do is just bring your neighbor, right. So we keep doing that. And at some point, we, you know, we should ask, like, why are we doing this? Like, of course, fixing the pipes is important. But what is exactly going on here? And the Bible is perfectly clear what's going on.
Makoto Fujimura 37:37
It goes, it flows in and out, you know, the Holy Spirit is flowing through the pipes, water, the spirit, you know, Christ's redemptive blood is flowing through the pipes, but also the wine of new creation is flowing through the pipes into a domain now, which is really, you know, so amazing when you think about it. And yet, we don't talk about it. You know, we are so busy fixing the world, which is not a bad thing. We need plumbers, you know, and I got a letter from a plumber, he read my book, and he said, "I'm a third-generation plumber, and I'm so glad you wrote about this. Because for me, plumbing isn't plumbing until I care about the people that I am working for." He said, when he read the kintsugi passage, he was like, "I am a kintsugi plumber." Because he's trying to pour gold into people's lives. It's not just enough to fix the pipes, you know, he has to have integrity and beauty to them. And he said, "No, I didn't think anybody would talk about plumbing this way." So I was very happy when he contacted me.
Chris McAlilly 38:59
That's funny that you mentioned that, because my wife and I, we bought a house that was built in the 70s and completely renovated it and we did a lot of the work ourselves. But we, I'm not a plumber, and I was not about to attempt to learn. And we found an amazing plumber. It was probably the best experience in the whole renovation process, was the plumber. And it was exactly what you're talking about. And I haven't thought about it until this moment that what made it so good is that he was so kind to us and he took his work so seriously. And every joint was done with precision and care. And I mean, he, you know, the infrastructure of our house is exposed at this point and you could see the way in which he was solving problems and considering his work as a craft.
Chris McAlilly 39:58
But it wasn't... I mean, all of that stuff was and we haven't had any problems with our pipes. But what the impression that was left is the way, how much he cared about us. And still, like, if I call him up, you know, he is gonna be there and he's a part of the fabric of our community and the fabric of our life and part of the ecosystem in which we live. But I hadn't put it together in those ways until...
Makoto Fujimura 40:25
That's like nihonga.
Chris McAlilly 40:27
Yeah.
Makoto Fujimura 40:27
It's an ecosystem. Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 40:29
Well, you mentioned kintsugi. So you do this deep dive into Biblical faith and into theology. And that gives you this other window into another dimension of Japanese craft culture. Talk a little bit about that. I know that kintsugi might be familiar to some folks, but maybe, if folks are not familiar, if you could kind of give it a dive into that.
Makoto Fujimura 40:54
Yeah, kintsugi as an art form is spreading the events so many books every day, you can find out easy, the history. But for me, I had a first-hand look into Japan ocha practice. And, you know, this venerable tradition of not just Japan ocha tradition, but also Japanese tea tradition, which really defined the aesthetics of kintsugi. "Kint" is gold. And "sugi" means the man. But "sugi" also means, at the same time, passing on the gift to the next generation. And so kintsugi is mending broken tables and teaware, typically, but instead of hiding the flaws to make it perfect again, as we would in the West, they highlight the fissures and they mend it with Japan lacquer so it is flexible, so that you can reuse the parts. But they also either pour gold or sprinkle gold on top to highlight the fractures.
Makoto Fujimura 42:13
And when I learned about this firsthand from kintsugi master in Tokyo, you know, I was just struck with the overlap of theological between Jesus's post-resurrection appearance, where he is still... nail marks are still with him. And it's through his wounds that we are healed. Thomas, you know, asks, or tells, everybody that "I won't believe until I touch the wounds," and Jesus appears and shows the wounds and Thomas doesn't touch. He worships. He is the first disciple, male disciple, to worship. You know, and I think that vision of post-resurrection Jesus is very important, because he carries the wounds with him into new creation. There is no sorrow, there are no tears anymore, but there are wounds still visible. And that means to me, everything that we go through on this side of eternity, even the most difficult things, can be reconfigured, redeemed, certainly. But it's brought into the new creation.
Chris McAlilly 43:34
I found, I mean, this is, you know, it's just a drumbeat through your work, and both your your painting, but also through this book, that the importance of the new creation, this idea that God will make all things new in the end, that God is the ultimate artist. And I think one of the things about that that I find fascinating, and it's within kind of this analogy to kintsugi as an art form or practice, is that God, you know, might create something brand new, but God chooses to use the broken shards and that the broken shards are an important part of what God desires to use to make new creation. It's such a beautiful, beautiful idea and what you end up with is something even more beautiful.
Makoto Fujimura 44:34
Yes. And some for some reason, God waits until we make to show up, and I explained that through the practice of Eucharist. Most important, you know at the heart of Christianity traditionally is this Eucharist of wine and bread. And both wine and bread are very hard to make, as some of us have found out during the pandemic. We're trying to make bread, but it takes many years of, you know, 10,000 hours of failures to make a good bread. And wine is even harder. Right? So, God chose two ways of human artifacts, let's say, of the things that we have to create in order to show up. Why would God do that? God could have just said, you know, pick up a maple leaf in the fall and remember me, you know.
Makoto Fujimura 45:37
No, he said, I'm gonna wait until you, you know, go through that 10,000 hours, maybe generations, of trying to raise good grape, and then we'll talk, meet, at the table. And I think that's such a beautiful picture of God honoring our making, and what God has ordained, which is this promise that heaven is going to come through the broken Earth, that this is going to be the way that God chooses.
Makoto Fujimura 46:20
You know, as Bishop N.T .Wright writes about in his books on resurrection, Jesus stays human after he is resurrected. He could have chosen anything to be, but Jesus is human, because Jesus wanted to be human. And that's a profound reality, you know, for all of us who struggle with being a human, right, and brokenness and our own bodies breaking down and so forth, our spirits breaking down and our communities breaking down, our nation breaking apart. But then that is the Genesis moment, for something new to be birthed, exactly because that's how God intended. God is still looking for the faithful to stand in the gap and be able to speak into it, just like a kintsugi master, behold the fragments, see something new in them, and to create this beautiful, new object, more valuable than the original, actually, in terms of kintsugi, that highlights the fissures and pour gold into them.
Chris McAlilly 47:46
I want to end just by, you know, kind of turning back to this idea that the cultural river or the cultural ecosystem that we live in, or that we're attempting to make, in--regardless of the form or craft or art that listeners may be engaged in. It seems to me that what your journey into interfaith and into theology, what it's offered to you is this more expansive vision. And I think it comes through at the end of the book, where you talk about, and I don't know many, I've not heard many voices talk about the importance of the tears of Christ, but you have a chapter called the "Tears of Christ in the Cultural River." I wonder if you would just talk about how you imagine kind of this expansive theological vision, what it might do within our culture today?
Makoto Fujimura 48:48
Yeah, so John 11.35: "Jesus wept." Two words. You know, I always joke if you want to memorize a difficult passage to pick that one. It's easy, "Jesus wept." But it's the most profound and I have made this a pinhole into, through which I see my entire heart. My writing flows out of that. And the reason is, you know, this book is composed around that pinhole. And I explore all the aspects of John 12 at the end, but really, it's throughout the entire book. And it culminates in the miracle story about Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.
Makoto Fujimura 49:40
And, you know, tears of Christ are utterly unnecessary. First of all, because he stood in Bethany with Mary, when all he had to do was take her by the hand and bring her to Lazarus's grave and resurrect him. That's what he came to do. He told the disciples, that's what he was going to do. That's why he's the rain is coming by when he meets Mary, when she is upset, weeping. She cannot understand why her friend, her Lord, will come late. Something strikes him that is deeply, deeply human. And he allows himself, indulges, perhaps in that sense, himself in wasting time with Mary. So the Word of God stood silent on the hills of Bethany, and wept. And that means that whatever we are going through, in our sufferings, in our living in a gap between what is ideal and what we experience, we can look at that passage and say, "Jesus is here, was here, is going to be here." And because he understands my pain and my condition and my exact sense of isolation and loneliness, there's no other comfort and presence that will change, that will transport me to that reality.
Makoto Fujimura 51:30
And what Mary does in response to understanding that reality, that Jesus's tears are given so extravagantly, that she also had to respond with her extravagance, which is in some way recorded in all four of the Gospels--and one of the most important passages for me also as an artist, because what I'm doing is also considered useless and wasteful and extravagant, and sometimes it doesn't make sense to a lot of people. And yet I am like Mary, simply responding to what Jesus's presence has meant for me.
Chris McAlilly 52:13
Well, we're grateful for all the ways in which you are responding to the gifts of Christ in extravagant ways, both with your time today in this conversation and your writing and in your painting. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.
Makoto Fujimura 52:31
My pleasure. Thank you.
Eddie Rester 52:34
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 52:36
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Eddie Rester 52:48
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]