In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth—and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters. (Gen 1:1-2)
Thus begins the first creation account in the book of Genesis: God forming the universe from disorder. As the account proceeds, we see the Lord bringing light to darkness, separating sky from sea, and sea from land. He populates space with “lights in the dome of the sky,” the sea with various creatures, and the land with animals and ultimately, humanity.
We know the story.
But if we take a moment to step back and view His handiwork—the stars and planets at night, the Metroparks in the fall, or a child at play—we see something more. We see that God in His creation is an artist.
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When the kids were younger, my wife Kristin and I took them to Washington D.C. on a family vacation. Walking from the National Mall to the Capitol Building, we stopped at the Grant Memorial. While it was impressive in its scale and artistry, it had not yet undergone the restoration it would in 2016: the patina had washed off the bronze sculpture, streaking the base, and some of the elements of the piece had broken off. That is what caught my attention.
Moving on about twenty yards from the monument, we realized that our Annie had stayed behind. When I went back, I saw her taking photos on her digital camera: not the typical “touristy” shots I would have expected on a Griswoldesque family vacation, but photos of the blue-green patina streaks in the cracks on the monument’s base, the shadows cast amid broken chain links and sword tips, and how the sun played off the figures. I’m prejudiced, but not that much. My middle schooler took stunning photos, revealing to my family and me things that were right before our eyes, but which we had not seen. Where I saw ruin and ugliness, she saw beauty.
It was then that I understood that our Annie was an artist.
In her brilliant book, “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art,” Madeleine L’Engle (of “A Wrinkle in Time” fame) offers this insight:
Leonard Bernstein says that for him, music is cosmos in chaos. That has the ring of truth in my ears and sparks my creative imagination. And it is true not only of music; all art is cosmos, cosmos found within chaos. At least all Christian art is cosmos in chaos.
Cosmos in chaos. Order in disorder. Beauty in ugliness. Truth in confusion. I read L’Engle’s words in Tom Healey’s “Theology and Art” class forty years ago and they have stayed with me since. Scripture makes it clear that God’s creative act was to bring order to the universe, an order scientists have since spent millennia uncovering. To create, to bring cosmos to chaos, to recognize cosmos in chaos, is to participate with God in His artistry.
This week, we are celebrating Fine Arts Week at Saint Ignatius. During this time, students are showcasing their talents, musically, visually, and rhetorically. They’ve been doing so all year, of course: our speech and debate team is among the finest in the state, anyone who has seen our Harlequins at work have been blown away by the talent on the stage, and our bands—marching, symphonic, and others—lift those who hear them with their music.
But the boys—and their older brothers—have been showcasing their gifts in other venues too. Aidan Ptak ’22, as part of a final project for class a few years ago, composed a musical piece as a way of explaining Catholic sacramental theology. Beginning the composition with a beautiful melody, he introduced a discordant note (representing Original Sin) from which he created another, more beautiful movement. Salvation history writ in 4/4 time. A few years earlier, Will Deucher ’18 created a painting juxtaposing an image of Syrian refugees with Jewish Holocaust victims queuing up on their way to a concentration camp, reminding us all of what can happen when we look the other way in the face of human suffering. Our valedictorian this year, Alisdair Welty ’25, is a marvel on the piano. One of my juniors, Matthew Khzouz ’26, has composed works of praise music that I can see being played at the Fest one of these days.
It is indeed one of the great joys of this week to see our students’ creativity and artistry.
Admittedly, the art world—like the larger world it so often reveals—is imperfect. Many of us can point to lewd and brutally dehumanizing work that tries to pass itself off as art. L’Engle recognized this:
There’s some modern art, in all disciplines, which is not [cosmos in chaos]; some artists look at the world around them and see chaos, and instead of discovering cosmos, they reproduce chaos, on canvas, in music, in words. As far as I can see, the production of chaos is neither art, nor is it Christian.
All the more reason to celebrate our Fine Arts faculty at Saint Ignatius, which has set a different course for our boys. Formed in the Jesuit tradition, they are teaching our students to discover—and uncover—truth in their work. As both Aidan and Will—following the lead of other artists—showed, finding cosmos in chaos is not always pleasant. Picasso’s “Guernica” is a brutal rendition of the 1937 fascist bombing of the Basque village of the same name; Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ’s” graphic depiction of Jesus’s Paschal Mystery is at once nauseating and heartbreaking; and Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” highlighting the consequences of unchecked appetites, is the stuff of nightmares.
Real art—finding cosmos in chaos—may not always be pleasant, but it is always true. Perhaps this is why the Catholic Church has always been a major patron of the arts.
A Catholic school, Saint Ignatius is committed to educating our students in the arts, not so much because the arts bring pleasure to our lives—though they do—but more importantly they help us to see things, important things, in the world we might otherwise miss. Like our Annie showing us the beauty in a neglected century-old memorial, artists help us to see creation as it truly is, both in its fallenness and in its beauty. Cosmos in chaos.
The way God sees it.
A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.