Making Art When the World is on Fire
by Katie Fox
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
Leonard Bernstein, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
What can we say about art and beauty in the face of mass shootings, war, evil, and destruction? Why talk about music, when 19 children in Uvalde have had their lives cut tragically short? Why discuss poetry, when the world feels like it’s on fire? What can beauty and the arts offer to us when we’ve lost everything we hold dear?
Art-making can’t bring back the people who were out shopping for groceries in Buffalo and never made it home. It can’t undo the annihilation of Mariupol’ in Ukraine. And it won’t be able to help with inflation, gas prices, or interest rates.
But here is what art-making can do:
It can help heal our own hearts.
It can express what words cannot.
It can draw us closer together in community.
It can make us more fully human.
It can help us become more like our Creator God.
It can be one way that we join God in His active renewal of all things.
Nothing we do here is wasted. For artists, for those who are called to be makers and creators, every time we engage in art-making, we draw one step closer to becoming the people God created us to be – one step closer to Kingdom life.
The poet Mary Oliver said, “We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.” Let us turn that ache toward the Lord, offering it up to Him, as we seek to make art, and to live, in the light of Christ’s love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katie Fox is the arts pastor at Christ Church Austin. She has always been immersed in the arts, whether at theater rehearsal, in a voice lesson, at choir practice, or scribbling away in her journal. It is her deep desire that every person would understand who it is he or she was created to be, and would, by God’s grace, be fully equipped to live into that identity. Katie has a Bachelor of Music degree from Texas Tech University, and is currently a MA student in theology and the arts at Fuller Seminary. She is a writer and a musician, and is married with two wonderful daughters. And just like Dostoyevsky, she believes that beauty will save the world.
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