I Don't Think Christian Artists Have Anything To Prove
Video from Inkwell by Christianity Today
I Don't Think Christian Artists Have Anything To Prove
This video is from our World In Our Words series.
"Malcolm Guite lost his faith as a teenager and was sure meaning was a delusion. Then he read Psalm 145 out loud in an empty London house, and he wasn’t alone in the room anymore.
In this conversation, poet and priest Malcolm Guite tells how a Keats poem cracked open his atheism, how the Psalms brought him back to faith, and why a college chaplain told him not to say the Gloria until he actually knew who he was praying to. He talks about reading the Psalms aloud across 150 miles of Northumberland, writing David’s Crown during lockdown, and the Arthurian epic he’s calling his most ambitious work yet.
He also says something every Christian artist needs to hear: you don’t make art to prove yourself. God’s yes to you in Christ is better than the best review you’ll ever get, and that frees you to make something beautiful with nothing to lose." from the video introduction
Chapters
00:00 An atheist reads the Psalms
[00:00] Growing up between Africa, Canada, and England
[00:00] Losing faith at boarding school
[00:00] The Keats poem that wouldn’t let the cage close
[00:00] Psalm 145: “The Lord is near”
[00:00] The chaplain who forbade the Gloria
[00:00] God loves from below, not above
[00:00] “Deep calls to deep”
[00:00] Reciting the whole Psalter on foot
[00:00] David’s Crown: writing through lockdown
[00:00] Psalms 21 to 24 as one story
[00:00] Eugene Peterson and the rock, the wall, and the shield
[00:00] Priest and poet: two halves of one vocation
[00:00] “Read poems as prayers”
[00:00] The poem knows more than the poet
[00:00] Writing an epic in your 60s
[00:00] Nothing to prove
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Mentioned in this conversation
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
Psalms 22, 23, 24, 88, and 145 (Coverdale translation, Book of Common Prayer)
Malcolm Guite, David’s Crown
Malcolm Guite, Faith, Hope and Poetry
John Donne, “La Corona”
Seamus Heaney, Station Island
Eugene Peterson
Christian Wiman
W.B. Yeats
Wendell Berry
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