OPINION: Christians sometimes face pressures telling us ‘this is the way to love God’
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A father whose podcast I follow recalled his young son saying to him one morning: ‘A thought appeared in my head, but it wasn’t my thought.’
‘What was the thought?’ dad asked. It was, the boy said, just four words: ‘Love me your way. I think it was Jesus,’ he added. ‘I think maybe Jesus is real.’
‘Love me your way.’ I thought at once of the book Lorna gave me at Christmas about Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). The Dutch-born artist painted so many memorable canvasses, yet only began creating the work he is famous for in the last 10 years of his short life.
In his 20s, this brilliant, troubled young man resolved ‘I will seek the love of Christ and strive to work for him all my life’. But he was unsure what form that work would take, and wondered: ‘There is something inside of me, what can it be?’
He worked as an art-dealer and (briefly) as a bookseller. He resolved to become a pastor like his father, but found studying academic theology was not for him.
He attended a training school for evangelists, but was ultimately rejected. Ostensibly this was because he lacked skills in oratory, but it appears to have actually been because of disapproval of his radical Christ-like identification with underprivileged people.
Only then did he begin sketching and painting.
Eventually, in 1882 he was able to say ‘I have found my work.’
He knew then that his mission was to create art with ‘more soul’, with ‘God in it’. He had a powerful sense of the bigness of God, the ‘something on high’ as he put it.
God was the creative spirit present in the whole of the cosmos; the visible expressed the invisible; the things which do not pass away were revealed in the things which do pass away; God was present in every blade of grass; ‘all nature seems to speak’.
And so Van Gogh found the work he was made for – art’s powerful oratory. His marvellous cavasses – those pictures of sunflowers, the glorious Starry Night, the sensitive sketches of working-class families – express something of the unseen Creator.
In painting and sketching, the artist was loving God in a way uniquely his, and in so doing he fully became the Vincent that God was calling him to be.
As Christians, we sometimes face pressures telling us ‘this is the way to love God’.
If ‘this’ refers to the ethics and values Jesus taught, then it is helpful. But when it comes to expressing our uniqueness, we may grow vaguely aware of that ‘something inside of me’, and find ourselves thinking thoughts that are not our thoughts, and sense God saying ‘love me your way’.
