by Michael Winters
Emily Dickinson famously wrote “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Art often works like that. It hits us from an unexpected angle. A song lyric may sneak up on you and reveal some corner of your inner life you didn’t know existed. A photograph may unexpectedly light up some part of your neural network that’s been dark for decades.
In James K.A. Smith’s new book How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, and Living Faithfully Now, the author points out how God’s self-revelation also often arrives from unexpected angles.
“The Creator of the cosmos comes at us slant. He shows up in a way that also hides. God’s self-communication, as Kierkegaard would put it, is always indirect, which means it takes more than ears and eyes to see and hear. God can come to the creation he made and yet not be received or perceived (John 1:10–11). When God empties himself, humbles himself, taking the form of a servant, the revelation is oblique (Phil. 2:6–7). On the road to Emmaus, not even resurrection immediately translates into recognition; something else has to be given. There is a grace needed to glimpse the God who graces history.”
As an artist, I find something comforting and encouraging about that. The Creator is artful in his own revelations, rarely as “clear” and undeniable as we’d like. I’ve talked with many artists who feel conflicted about how their faith relates to their art. They feel the gospel truth should be more evident in their artwork. Some feel their art should proclaim the gospel in more linear fashion. No doubt, some are called to this and they need encouragement to work in that way. For most with these types of thoughts though, an unnecessary guilt arises when they can’t figure out how to authentically and clearly make their art tell “all the truth.” But the truth is, God doesn’t even communicate like that, so why do we feel the pressure to?
Some artists that feel that pressure stuff the problem down until it seems to go away. Some make ineffective art that attempts a straight telling of the truth. However, those that end up making compelling, truth-witnessing art usually do so by making it “slant”…and by learning what Dickinson knew at the end of that same poem:
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
No single artwork can tell the whole capital-T Truth all at once, but the Truth comes out slant and gradually, and, the truth is, that might be all we can bear. Don’t give up on telling the truth through your art. Indeed tell all the truth, but tell it slant, knowing the Truth must dazzle gradually.