Seeing and experiencing the consolation of faith

There’s a now-defunct Biblical art initiative that I dearly wish had not gone offline a few years ago. Old and New was [quote] “a collaborative design project … providing a platform for contemporary graphic artists to exhibit works themed on Biblical stories and passages.”

I especially appreciated this explicit value of the project: privilege honesty over propriety.

Don’t show us what you think we want to see, what the conventions of faith communities have identified as orthodox and edifying. Show us what we need to see, what our everyday, real-life concerns might look like, might feel like, in conversation with the living word of God.

One of my favorite images from the Old and New Project was a piece envisioning this scene of Paul and Silas in prison. The two are seated next to each other, wearing bright complementary colors, five o’clock shadows visible on both their soulful faces. They’re looking heavenward, and musical notes seem to dangle from an unseen height as if lowered on strings. It’s beautiful, peaceful, whimsical.

And I have no doubt that such a conception of this scene was authentic and faithful for the artist. Nevertheless, five or so years after I’d first fallen in love with this simple image, when I returned to it this week it seemed off somehow.

For a time, this interpretation felt to me more proper than honest, an idealized portrayal of one idyllic moment in a passage otherwise full of brutality.

For instance, the picture doesn’t show the slave girl with the spirit of divination, who gets a raw deal here. The writer of Acts tells us that Paul was simply annoyed with the way she was following him and Silas. She, or rather the evil spirit in her, kept declaring nothing but the truth about the pair of missionaries: “These men are slaves of the Most High God and proclaim to you a way of salvation.” You’d think they’d be happy for the free advertising.

I don’t know how to feel about Paul’s liberating initiative here. Not only does he seem to have a somewhat mixed motive for casting out the demon, notice also that the woman is now out of whatever good graces she dwelled in while she was so profitable to her owners as a fortune teller.

It’s not hard to imagine that her day-to-day life would have gotten substantially worse after this incident. And we have no other choice but to imagine, because the thread of the story turns away from her entirely as her owners go off to press a case against Paul and Silas.

In these later scenes, as well, there is brutality and dehumanization. We see a state punishing inconvenient, albeit thinly accused, troublemakers, as states have so often done and continue to do.

And the threat of such violence is never far even from those who help prop up these structures of power. The terrified jailor was willing to immediately take his own life when he awoke to conclude that forces beyond his control had apparently released his captives.

It’s wonderful that he chooses to be baptized after his brush with death. Here again, though, I cannot help but wonder how his story ends. Presumably his superiors were none too happy about a busted up jailhouse that was still short at least two prisoners and one employee.

Like the enslaved woman who lost most of her value to her owners, the jailer might not have had a happy ending, though in this case at least he presumably had the consolation of his newfound faith.

**

The consolation of faith. It’s easy to dismiss the idea, as I did at first when I returned to the earnest image of Paul and Silas singing in jail.

In that moment, my interpretive loyalties rested squarely with those of New Testament scholar Jennifer Kaalund, who calls us to “remember the enslaved girl as clearly as we remember Paul and Silas,” to remember the jailor’s brush with brutality in addition to his baptism.

Let’s read this text more honestly, I thought, through the lens of oppressed and manipulated peoples then and now. I still think that.

And yet I’ve come to believe such a reading only accentuates the need for us to recognize and celebrate the consolation of faith, to notice and to the practice the presence of our liberating savior, made manifest whenever two or three huddle together in Jesus’s name.

Although the author of Acts may ignore the fate of these narrative role-players, we know that God cares for each and every hair on their heads, remaining faithfully present to those on the margins when the temporary spotlight turns away.

**

I had a pretty challenging week. I was serving as chaplain to a gathering of church leaders in Minneapolis, a group struggling to make sense of how we will transform and sustain theological education.

My main task was to lead worship, worship I’d helped plan in a style with which I’m not especially experienced, worship I suspected some in the room would find challenging or frustrating.

My primary collaborator had to leave halfway through the event to help lead music at a gathering across town, which meant I also had to try to fill her shoes as a paperless song leader. She is charismatic and joyous, playful with her body and tuneful with her voice; hers are not Kyle-shaped shoes, and I was all too aware of both my shortcomings and my anxiety about them.

Some of you may know this Taizé song: “Nada te turbe, nada te espante, quien a Dios tiene, nada le falta. Nada te turbe, nada te espante: solo Dios basta.” Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten, those who seek God will never be wanting. Only God fills us.

As I stood in a claustrophobic basement conference room practicing this song between sessions, it occurred to me that my lack of faith in these very words—“nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten,” I wish—my fear in that moment was precisely why I needed these words, why I needed to be singing them.

And something like my situation was probably true for many of the folks I’d be leading in song later that afternoon.

Paul and Silas singing in their jail cell is the spiritual center of this thoroughly troubling text. And so idealized is exactly what an image of their witness should be.

They may well have been scared in their shackles, in the dark—what better reason to join their voices in song? Practices of faith are the ideal we pursue, the pattern into which we grow. Fear may give way to consolation, doubt give way to faith, as it did for me as I sang this week.

Alice Potter’s beautiful image is, I think, meant more as a hope-filled promise about how God shows up for us than a pious artistic recitation that implies it’s not OK for Christians not to be OK.

It’s a witness to the way that those bound by fear and by forces still more demonic will receive God’s consolation when they raise their voices in trust or in despair. We all need these confident and honest visions of faith, as we are led on the difficult journey toward the fulness of freedom.

Image credit: Alice Potter via Old & New Project (used here under fair use – criticism)