Terry Glaspey 23:59

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Discovering God through the arts. That's the topic now on First Person as we talk with author Terry Glaspie. I'm Wayne Shepherd and we'll start the conversation with Terry momentarily. Thanks for joining us for this weekly visit as we meet people from every corner of life who love and serve Jesus Christ with their lives. Each person has a unique call and purpose in life and we explore their story with the goal of learning about our own journey in Christ.

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I connected recently online with Terry to talk about this and

And as we began, I asked him if he had always been drawn to the arts. Not really. That's the interesting thing. I grew up in a home where, you know, we would watch TV, but that was about it. I mean, I never went to an art museum as a child or attended a concert of classical music.

I think we did get to go here, Johnny Cash. Well, that's art in its own form, isn't it? Oh, absolutely, that's art. But, you know, we weren't, it wasn't a home that really put a lot of emphasis on that.

But what was interesting is not long after I became a Christian, I'm kind of a naturally analytical person. So, you know, I was asking a lot of questions about what does this all mean? And I stumbled across Francis Schaeffer and reading Francis Schaeffer's books made me think, hmm, I need to explore a little bit about the world of art and then explore.

It just began to just open something up within me. And I found time and time again, some of the places where I had the most powerful spiritual connections were places

Listening to music or reading a great novel or poetry, looking at a great painting. And, you know, I've come to the place where when I travel, I'm always looking for art museums that I can visit because I know that.

that I'm going to emerge from that art museum with my spirit full. And yeah, it's become for me, I guess that gives hope for those who don't have much background. I don't have a lot of academic background in the arts. I just have the background of personal experience. Mm-hmm.

Well, this isn't a book about art for art's sake. This is a book that really seeks to merge great art with our spirituality, as you mentioned just a moment ago. So let's talk about that for a moment. What connections do you see? Well, I would really like for people to think about the fact that

When we think about spiritual disciplines, we think about prayer and reading the Bible and meditation and worship, etc., all of which are tools that draw us closer into a relationship with God. And what I want to suggest through the book is that our personal engagement with the arts can also be, in a certain sense, kind of a spiritual discipline. It can become spiritual.

a tool that God uses in our lives to help us to see the world differently, to see ourselves differently, and to see Him more profoundly. And that has been really my personal experience. And I hadn't really seen any books really address that part of the arts.

I wanted to write a book that was accessible to everyone to say that the arts aren't just for some group of people who are kind of the artsy fartsy elite, but the arts are for all of us. And the arts don't always even have to be the most, you know, the most high brow stuff. I mean,

Yes, I've loved and learned from Bach and Mozart and Haydn, but I've also totally loved Johnny Cash and...

U2, Bob Dylan, and countless other artists who were more popular. I love the films of Frank Capra, like It's a Wonderful Life, as much as I love some of the more arty European films. Indies, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They all become, they're all different windows in. Yeah.

So it's really a search for beauty and appreciating creativity, isn't it? I mean, that's one way of looking at it. Yes. I mean, I think that beauty is definitely a huge part of what I'm trying to talk about, is that beauty not only feeds our soul and calms our soul and reorients our soul, but beauty actually is a way of...

leading us into a deeper understanding of who God is. You know, I think of Psalm 19, which tells us, you know, that the heavens declare the glory of God. And it's the beauty of nature that communicates to us, just as the beauty seen in human creativity can reveal something of God's

wonder and majesty and power right and just the fact that you know I was thinking the other day about the fact that in the world that God created how many different shades of green are there I mean there are there are thousands of shades of green now if God was just about being functional he

He would have just created one color green, and that would have been adequate. But no, there's this profusion of green. And you could use that kind of example with so many different things. Flowers. Why so many flowers? It's because I think God himself delights in flowers.

his creativity and wants us to learn to delight in not only in his creativity but also in the creative gift that he's placed with inside of us yes well you you talk about and you write about uh this uh appreciating great art as a spiritual tool for us and you write about the fact that it can develop empathy and compassion for instance let's talk about that for a moment

Yes, I mean, you know, the older I get, the more I come to understand the importance of empathy. Now, empathy is not the same thing as sympathy. Sympathy means I feel sorry for someone. It's kind of a looking down, maybe. But empathy is looking down.

And trying to understand what life looks like and feels like from within another person's experience and perspective. It's identifying with, yes. Yes, it's identifying with. And, you know, I think about all of the struggles that our own culture is going through right now.

And I think that one of the things that could help us is if we could learn a little empathy, learn to be able to put ourselves inside another people's shoes and understand empathy.

That we all see life a little bit differently. All right, but how does art accomplish that? Well, I think the way that art accomplishes it is it gives us vicarious experiences. I mean, I think especially with novels and with films in particular, those two genres,

We live inside somebody else's life for a period of time while we're reading that book or watching that film. And we're put in places of having experiences we might never have ourselves. And we come away from that, I think, to use a phrase that was used on The Simpsons at one point, embiggened. We're made bigger inside.

You know, God expands our heart through the vicarious experiences we have through art. This is something C.S. Lewis talked about in his book, An Experiment in Criticism, that with great

books he was talking about specifically at that point we see the world not just through our own eyes but maybe through a thousand different eyes and it makes us larger inside and I think it makes us more compassionate more forgiving and I think it makes us more patient with one another which is a spiritual development in our part

Absolutely, absolutely. And maybe what it does is it allows us to see other people a little bit more the way that God sees them. I mean, God is the ultimate empath, right? And so we learn, I think, to not only think, but also to sort of feel a little bit like God feels about other people through the arts.

There's more conversation to come with the author of Discovering God Through the Arts. More with Terry Glaspie in just a moment. I'm Ed Cannon. The Far East Broadcasting Company partners with First Person because we celebrate the stories of people everywhere who have given their lives to Christ and serve Him. Our broadcasters in 50 countries of the world hear stories every day of people whose lives are transformed by the gospel and who have

faithful we've been taught God's Word. In addition to First Person, I'm pleased that Wayne and I host a podcast, and we invite you to join us. Listen to Until All Have Heard at febc.org. That's febc.org. ♪

My guest is Terry Glaspie. Terry's latest book is Discovering God Through the Arts, How We Can Grow Closer to God by Appreciating Beauty and Creativity. And by the way, congratulations, Terry. This book is the winner of the 2022 Christianity Today Book Award for Best Book of the Year in its category, along with Book of the Year in its category by the Gospel Coalition.

So thank you for joining us today and talking about this, and congratulations on those awards. Well, they were a surprise, a very, very pleasant surprise, I will say, yes. I will mention another book written previously, which is just as good, 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know, the Fascinating Stories Behind Great Works of Art, Literature, Music, and Film,

Terry also wrote this book. Both of these books are published by Moody, by the way, and we'll have information and links to these books in our program notes at firstpersoninterview.com. You mentioned to me that this is one of the most personal books that you've written. Is that because it's kind of, in a way, a bit of a travelogue through some museums? I think that's part of what it is. I mean, I like to think of myself as kind of a curator, right?

A curator is somebody who introduces people to great art, great music, and whatnot. And that's part of what I wanted this book to do. And I share some experiences in the book about profound moments of spiritual insight that I've had while visiting art museums.

And I think in a sense, reading the book, as one person told me, was a little bit like touring an art museum with someone who knew a little, who knew something about the art and also had thought about its impact on the spiritual life. Well, tell me one or two of those instances where God just touched your heart when you walk through a museum and see one of these great masterpieces, for instance, hanging on the wall or a great sculpture. Yeah.

that you've only seen photographs of before. Yes. So I actually, in the book, I talk about my experience of being in Venice.

which was wonderful. And it just happened that the rest of the tour had gone on to somewhere else, and I wanted to have an extra day in Venice. And there were some art things I wanted to see, and one of them was a museum that held about 100 paintings by Tintoretto.

And Tintoretto had been paid by this very wealthy group of people to paint paintings about most of the experiences of the life of Jesus.

And so I walked in and it's not something that's, you know, as well known. It's not in all the guidebooks necessarily of Venice. So when I got there, I had the place almost to myself and it's two floors. I looked at the first floor, beautiful paintings of the nativity and some of Jesus performing some of the miracles. And then I went up the staircase and more wonderful, wonderful paintings. And they're tucked into the back door.

of the second floor was a little room. Well, actually it was a fairly large room. And as I turn the corner into this room, there it was this huge painting of the crucifixion of Jesus. And it took up most of the wall of, of this room. And I, my mouth opened,

Dropped open, quite literally dropped open at the power of this image. And I hadn't expected to do this, but I found myself praying and thanking, thanking Christ for what he did.

had done for me. Somehow that painting helped me to realize again, but maybe in a little bit more profound way, the sacrifice Christ had made on the cross. And the rest of the day, I visited that early in the morning and then I toured around the rest of Venice, thoroughly enjoying myself, but constantly carrying that image in my head. And

Always bringing me back to a thought of thankfulness and appreciation for God's grace. So, you know, I think there's a sense in which by, you know, making visits to museums or even just looking at the art in books, right?

One of the things that Moody allowed me to do is put a lot of images of great art in the book. We create our own, in our brains, I think, we create our own little museum that we carry around with us.

And the wonderful thing is that we can draw on that in times of need. There are paintings I've seen about Christ's comforting that when I need a moment of comfort, sometimes I can pull that image into my bed and it's just a spur for me to be calm and to appreciate what he's done for me. Yeah.

You mentioned your reaction at viewing the crucifixion of Christ depicted in that painting. You're writing your book about the fact that this appreciation of art and this drinking in of art can aid us in prayer and contemplation. Do you want to say anything more about that?

Sure. I, man, you know, give me an opening. I can say a lot about that. Because in some ways that was one of, even though it kind of closes the book, it's really where everything in the book is driving toward. And, you know, I think about...

different both paintings which kind of calm my soul and prepare me for prayer I think of paintings that that excite within me a theological truth that I need to be reminded of I think especially of poems poems by like Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert and T.S. Eliot and other great poets

That sometimes I will grab a, you know, I'll grab down their little book of poems and flip to certain poems which have become for me prayers that then I pray to God. I let their words become my words and aim them toward God. I mean, you know, even if you think about hymns, which is another really an art form. Yes.

Hymns are about somebody else giving us words that we can use to express what's within us that we probably couldn't quite figure out how to express otherwise. And the arts do that in powerful ways. Yeah, I like to read hymns as poetry. I really do. There was a project that I had just minor involvement in a couple of years ago that found all these unpublished poems by Fanny Crosby.

And some friends in Nashville took those unpublished poems and set them to new music in contemporary settings. And it's just wonderful to know that her words are coming alive now after all these years. Well, we've been talking about art primarily in its classical sense. At least that's what I've been having in my head here as we've talked. You know, the great paintings, the great sculptures of Europe, that kind of thing. But there is, of course, contemporary art everywhere.

I don't know if the church today is really doing anything to encourage artists. I only know of one church in central Indiana that really has an art gallery as a part of its worship experience.

And in the past, there were patrons of the arts. We're missing all that, aren't we? I think something is amiss here. We are. I mean, think about the great cathedrals or large churches even of the 19th century who had stained glass windows. And those stained glass windows were often...

telling stories. They were a way to remind people of why we're here and what we're doing in the worship service. And, and,

You know, I would love to see churches get more behind the artists, not just to think of the artists as functionaries, you know, to create what you might call propaganda for the cause of Christ, but who could really express their own experiences and then help us vicariously learn and grow from that. Yeah.

You know, I would love to see churches get more involved in doing that. And, you know, one of the things I've done over recent years is visit churches who've invited me and we actually will do like an arts weekend where we'll really put a focus on art. And I'll give some talks and oftentimes what we'll do along with that is,

is do an art exhibition. And what I say is get the people in your church who paint or do needlework or create quilts or whatever they do that's artistic. Let's put that all out there for the church to see. And what's amazing is people go, oh, I never knew that George could do that or that Wilma could take such practice

Beautiful photographs. Yeah, it's wonderful to think of those issues of creativity as acts of worship. That's what's happening there as well, isn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And we can share with others in that experience, I think.

So anyway, yes, I totally agree. This is an area in which especially the evangelical church, we have not treated our artists very well. We're a little...

I think sometimes we're a little frightened of them because, you know, they see things a little bit different. Yeah, they do. And sometimes they're a little quirky. But it's out of that sometimes that comes their gift. And so I think we need to support them, support what they do. I mean, yes, financially, but even more so just by encouragement and appreciation. You know, God is interested in every area of our lives.

And so he's the God of all truth. All truth is God's truth. And so what we can do is through the arts address that.

not only the issues of our faith, but issues about love and relationships and personal integrity and justice and injustice, all kinds of issues. These can perhaps be more effectively addressed by art than by politics or argumentations or philosophy.

We can change people's minds, I think, most efficiently, sometimes by using creative ways. Our guest has been Terry Glaspie, and his book is titled Discovering God Through the Arts. This book, as well as a previous book, 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know, will be linked at our website, firstpersoninterview.com.

A word of thanks to the Far East Broadcasting Company for supporting First Person. FEBC's ministry reaches millions of people every day with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The radio programs penetrate deep into hard-to-reach corners of the world through shortwave, AM and FM stations, speaker box digital technology, and online services. The results are remarkable, and you can read and view the stories online at febc.org, where you can also listen to the podcast on

until all have heard. febc.org Now, with thanks to my friend and producer Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Thanks for listening to First Person.