The Mystery of Art: Becoming an Artist in the Image of God

In The Mystery of Art: Becoming an Artist in the Image of God, Emmy Award-winning actor and musician Jonathan Jackson explores the profound implications of human creativity in the image of God, along with the process of becoming an artist (of any sort) dedicated to practicing his or her art from the context of a deep relationship with God. The true Christian artist is not necessarily one who treats religious themes, but one who creates through the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of God.

'With uncommon attention to the matter at hand—our matter, our lives apprehended as an ongoing encounter with the Mystery of persons in the image of God—Jonathan Jackson brings into harmony the wisdom of the Fathers and the insights of great artists, past and present. The result is a compelling articulation of how the very shaping of our lives is best understood as the most precious and most efficacious of arts.' Scott Cairns, Author of Compass of Affection and Idiot Psalms

Jonathan Jackson began his career in Hollywood over twenty years ago on the soap opera General Hospital. His heart-wrenching performances helped win him five Emmy Awards. Jonathan has also performed in many feature films, including The Deep End of the Ocean, Tuck Everlasting, and Insomnia. His work has taken him to many places around the world, including Ireland, Italy, Romania, and Canada. Jonathan is currently one of the stars of the ABC primetime drama, Nashville, a show centered on the inner workings of the Nashville music scene. Jonathan plays Avery Barkley, an up-and-coming singer/songwriter trying to find his way in Music City.

Along with acting, Jonathan is also the lead singer of the band Enation and the author of Book of Solace and Madness, which was published in 2012. Enation are an alternative 3 piece from Nashville, TN. Their sound is inspired by alternative, anthemic, post-punk, early new-wave artists who tend to define genres - only to defy them later.

Brothers Jonathan and Richard Lee Jackson began playing music together as kids. Originally from the Northwest, the brothers moved to Los Angeles in their early teenage years and began cutting their teeth on the Sunset Strip - playing iconic venues like The Whiskey A-Go-Go, The Roxy and The Viper Room before they were old enough to indulge in the free drinks offered to the other acts on the bill.

Jonathan is known as an enigmatic, introverted frontman. Sit with him for any length of time and you’ll realize he is a well-read, deep thinker. You’re more likely to catch references to Dostoyevsky, an obscure monk from Greece, or the Russian revolution of 1918 in his lyrics than the more superfluous themes in today's pop music. “We’re more interested in the deeper themes in life, the bigger questions, the stuff beneath the surface,” Jonathan says quietly.

Prior to joining up with the Jackson Brothers in Enation, bassist Jonathan Thatcher, was a member of the U.K. based rock band Delirious?, a band the brothers were into. “Jon Thatcher has been an artist we’ve respected for a long time.” Richard says.

What’s ahead may be looking back. Their new music is described with references to “alternative, post-punk, early new wave” with bands like Echo & The Bunnymen, Talk Talk, and Simple Minds grabbing Enation's attention and dominating their intra-band conversations.

Jackson has said that, ‘Discovering the Orthodox Faith changed the way I see the world...’ Another group of Orthodox rockers are Luxury, a band from small-town Georgia, who, on the cusp of success, suffer a devastating touring wreck with long-term consequences. In the intervening years, they continue to make records and three members of the band become Eastern Orthodox priests.

The wreck changed their fortunes as well (evidently) as their ambitions. With each successive record, there was a greater sense of self-reflection in Lee Bozeman’s lyrics, and the music followed that deepening maturity, all the while maintaining the fundamental dichotomy of soaring melodies on top of angular post-punk instrumentation.

The first record was essentially a document of their live shows, which were remarkable events in their intensity and the band’s posture of defiance directed even at their own audience. On successive records, though, Luxury learned to use the studio as an instrument. While, on the first record Bozeman asks “So, what do you expect from life?” he seems to have spent each of the following records seeking to answer that very question.

Through interviews and archival footage, ‘Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury’ tells the gripping and poignant story of Luxury and documents the making of a new record, now as priests. 

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Enation - Revolution Of The Heart.

Tryin' to throw your arms around the world (2)

And I Have No Compass

On both counts – the running and the falling down – movement is essentially improvisatory.

“”There’s a line in, I think, the New Testament,” Bono told Joe Jackson of Hot Press before Zooropa was released, “which says that the spirit moves and no one knows where it comes from or where it's going. It's like a wind. I’ve always felt that way about my faith. That’s why on Zooropa I say I’ve got no religion. Because I believe that religion is the enemy of God. Because it denies the spontaneity of the spirit and the almost anarchistic nature of the spirit.”” This embodies itself in lines such as “And I have no compass/And I have no map” from Zooropa and in U2’s improvisatory approach to creating music and writing lyrics:

“On the road, U2 are constantly working informally on new ideas. As a matter of course, rehearsals and sound-checks are recorded. Frequently the germ of something new will emerge as the band improvise their way through a series of rhythm patterns and chord changes … U2 songs often proceed along parallel tracks. On the one side, a set of musical ideas is taking shape. On the other, Bono and The Edge are developing bits of titles, lyrics, choruses and whatever other scraps of ideas have suggested themselves. The real heartache starts when they begin the process of bringing these different elements together.”

A Sort of Homecoming

Improvisation leads to two further characteristics of their spirituality, allusiveness and reconciliation. U2 have been vociferously criticised at times for didactic preaching and yet this has always been an approach they have tried to avoid. There can, of course, be a big gap between what people say and what people do. U2 did not always stick to their good intentions but, they did have good intentions, did generally acknowledge when they had fallen down and did get up, dust themselves down and try again.

There were also times when they did succeed, both in their songs and in performance. The best U2 songs are either impressionist sketches or aphoristic paradoxes. ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ is an example of the former while ‘The Fly’ is an example of the latter. Niall Stokes has described ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ as an “impressionistic reverie … written in a dreamy, cinematic style” but with a “constant sense of movement propelling the song” through the intermingling of sex, spirituality, death and resurrection. There is, he says, “a sense in the lyrics that things are falling apart and the centre cannot hold" but also a sense of reassurance from the control that the writer has over the poetry and ideas.

Conversely, ‘The Fly’ has a specific sense of place – Hell – and a much sharper and wittier, but ultimately no less enigmatic, turn of phrase:

“I became very interested in these single-line aphorisms,” Bono states. “I’d been writing them. So I got this character [The Fly] to say them all, from ‘A liar won’t believe anybody else’ to ‘A friend is someone who lets you down’. And that’s where ‘The Fly’ was coming from … It was written like a phone call from hell, but the guy liked it there,” Bono told David Fricke of Rolling Stone. “It was this guy running away – ‘Hi honey, it’s hot but I like it here’.”

This same allusiveness can also be seen in performance through a use of symbolic gesture. For part of their ZooTV tour U2 included live broadcasts from war engulfed Sarajevo in the show. This brought accusations of bad taste from some critics but for others it was a means of realisation:

"The fact that it felt so awkward, that the thing sat so badly in the show, is a way of saying to this huge audience, 'There are things that can't be accommodated easily, and that are painful and awkward and you can't homogenise them into the rest of the world'. I thought exactly the awkwardness of it, the ill-fittingness, was what made it memorable. I've never been made in a rock and roll show, to feel the pain of the world before".

This allusive language both lyrically and in performance has resonances with the novelist Nicholas Mosley’s suggestion that society needs to develop a language or style “by which apparent contradictions might be held … [being] elusive, allusive, not didactic”. It may be that U2 have moved from proclaiming truth to testing the style, substance and patterning of truth. That they may be, in however limited a fashion, exploring the message of standing back, coincidence and growing tenderness from the acceptance of complexities.

That this is so, may also be seen in their reconciliatory intent and practice. ‘New Years Day’, for example, contains the line, “Though torn in two we can be one”. This is reconciliation in a lyric that - through images of separated lovers returning home and of a united crowd at a Solidarity rally - links public and private in the injunction to be one. War, the album from which ‘New Years Day’ comes, is, paradoxically, about surrender.

War was the outcome of internal conflicts between individual members of the band and the demands of their Christian faith, as they understood it at the time. Their reconciliation of these conflicts came, in part, from the understanding that Christianity did not divide body from spirit or sacred from secular. Instead these were, at best, reconciled and, at least, held together in tension.

Reconciliation is also embodied in their activism and working methods. U2 do not simply sing about the world’s woes they also take practical actions to address them, whether this is contributing to concerts/records to raise charitable funds, symbolic actions such as their Sellafield protest for Greenpeace, or, most significantly, Bono’s campaigning for debt relief through Jubilee 2000.

In their working method, scraps or fragments of music and lyrics are combined to create something that is larger than the sum of the parts. Adam Clayton describes this as being "not just a playing thing - it's a whole supportive role within the commune". John Waters has identified this sense of unity as a key feature in the impact of U2:

"As in no other band that I am aware of it, the music of U2 is a unity of all its parts. There is no sense that the music can be divided into its constituent elements - into voice, guitar, rhythm section, backing, accompaniment. It comes to you whole, maybe because that is the way it is imagined. The Edge plays the guitar, as Bono sings, Larry hits the drums or Adam plays the bass, not as an end in itself, but in order to serve the song. Voice and instruments are united in a single purpose: they tell the story".

U2’s spirituality, their language of reconciliation is not just about words - the lyrics are allusive containing hints and glimpses - but is also about the friendship between the four band members, their approach to composition and performance, the relationships and approach of their organisation. Their spirituality then, is a combination of words and actions and of on-stage and off-stage, characterised by movement, allusion, symbolism and action, aiming to express honesty, integrity and wholeness.

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U2 - Zoo Station.