The Art of Wine Making (Part 1)

Today I did something I’ve been wanting to do for ages – I started making wine.  Despite what the hundreds of websites on the subject would have you believe, it’s (apparently) pretty easy.  So, over the next few weeks, I hope to turn this pile of stuff (not so much the knives)…

…into delicious red wine.

My First Exhibition!

OK, so I helped to organise it, but I think it still counts.

During some recent training days with my lovely UCCF colleagues, my friend Chris and I organised a “culture evening.”  We work with some very talented people, so the whole thing came together brillitantly.

Watching TV to the Glory of God

A colleague of mine recently posted a quote from John Piper, highlighting the dangers of, amongst other things, watching TV:

The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:18-20).

I agree with John Piper, and with Jim – this is a real danger.  And (as someone else said, but I can’t remember who) when Jesus comes back, no-one will wish they’d watched more TV.  But is this the whole story?  I love TV.  I don’t just enjoy lounging in front of it and switching my brain off – I love it as an artform, as a medium for communication, and as a tool for education.  So here are some of my thoughts on why and how Christians should engage with TV…

CS Lewis and the Cultural Conversation

I often tell people that they can treat culture, and art in particular, either as something to be consumed, or as a conversation. Once you realise that an artist is trying to say something through their work, it moves you from the one-way attitude of the consumer to the two-way listening and speaking of a conversation.

Yesterday, I found this (thanks to Justin Taylor who posted it).  It turns out CS Lewis said much the same thing in his 1961 book An Experiment in Criticism.

A work of (whatever) art can be either ‘received’ or ‘used.’ When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist.  When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities.

The one, to use an old-fashioned example, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know roads we have never yet explored.  The other is like adding one of those little motor attachments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides. These rides in themselves may be good, bad, or indifferent.

The ‘uses’ which the many make of the arts may or may not be intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid. That’s as may be. ‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.

I think this goes beyond just how we interact with art – it even has an impact on what we consider to actually be art.  When we’re faced with art we don’t understand or don’t like, we’ll rejected it.  I often hear people say, “that isn’t art, though, is it?!”  What if what they actually mean is, “I can’t use that.”  But how would that change if we think in terms of receiving rather than using art?

Surely the only option for Christians is to aim to receive art, rather than to use art?  Using art is selfish – it goes no further than what I can get and what I need.  Reception is a response of love – it is focussed on someone else, the artist, rather than on oneself.  That doesn’t mean we give up our enjoyment of the art we engage with, but the way we enjoy it is different.  Instead of satisfying our needs or experiencing our own pleasure, we step into someone else’s world and enrich our own.  CS Lewis said, ‘in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself’.  That’s what happens when we choose to receive art and take part in the conversation.