Culture Care (Makoto Fujimura) | Book Review
Our family friend and mentor, Makoto Fujimura paints a word picture of a decaying culture in need of restoration in his book, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life. Then he offers very practical considerations towards cultural stewardship. He says, “Culture is not the territory to be won or lost but a resource we are called to steward with care. Culture is a garden to be cultivated...and it begins with the cultivation of the soul.”
He suggests that we feed our culture’s soul with beauty, creativity, and generosity.
Such care may begin with care for our own souls, as we face our own brokenness and then begin caring for culture by our efforts to bring forth beauty out of brokenness. Art. Dance. Music. Entrepreneurship.
Fujimura presents a solution to our dissatisfaction with today's culture, which is to nourish culture’s soul by raising up those who by their Christ-given creativity introduce both beauty and healing through art. He shares his experiences as an acclaimed artist, who served his community to influence post-911 New York City culture with his paintings that presented hope in a time of despair. He proposes that the arts provide the most powerful form of non-violent resistance, and he tells about the unknown artist in the crowd who prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to go off script, resulting in his famous “I Have A Dream” speech.
Makoto also tells stories of culture-shaping artists like Vincent Van Gogh, who was an evangelist-turned-artist, who said that there is nothing truly more artistic than to love people. He loved people by painting their portraits.
Rooted in a Biblical-worldview, Makoto Fujimura outlines an artist’s generative care for culture as being genesis, generous and generational. He invites all artists in some way to exercise their creativity generatively. Often this involves "genesis moments,” where brokenness and tragedy birth something new. It is generous in a world that often just thinks of survival. Becoming generative means thinking across generations, observing the work of those who have gone before us, working for a generation relevantly in our own creative works of art, and passing this along to future generations.
Makoto issues a call for a different kind of engagement with culture, one of caring, of becoming generative rather than engaging in war or battle, of fostering beauty in our common life, and of sustaining and renewing our culture. Mako cites the prophet Isaiah as a Biblical perspective on the healing and restoration Christ can bring to the brokenhearted and ruined cities that have been devasted for generations: “to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead a spirit of despair” (Isaiah 61: 3).
This is what Makoto Fujimura says about himself in his book:
"I am not a Christian artist. I am a Christian, yes, and an artist. I dare not treat the powerful presence of Christ in my life as an adjective. I want Christ to be my whole being. Vincent van Gogh was not a Christian artist either, but in Christ he painted the heavens declaring the glory of God. Emily Dickinson was not a Christian poet, and yet through her honest wrestling, given wings in words, her works, like Vincent's, like Harper Lee's, like Mahalia Jackson's--speak to all the world as integrated visions of beauty against injustice. It is time for followers of Christ to let Christ be the noun in our lives, to let our whole being ooze out like a painter's colors with the splendor and the mystery of Christ, the inexhaustible beauty that draws people in. It is time to follow the Spirit into the margins and outside the doors of the church." (pp. 84-85)
This is a book for artists and people like me who care about artists in our church family. This book is for anyone with an artistic gift to care for culture with understanding, restoration, and healing. It is a book for anyone with a passion for the arts, for supporters of the arts, and for creators who understand how much the culture we all share affects human thriving today and shapes the generations to come.
Link to buy the book - https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Care-Reconnecting-Beauty-Common/dp/0830845038
