A Narrative Description of Our Purpose
These days, everything is for sale. Everyone from marketing executives to fundamentalists has appropriated this Greek triumvirate of goodness, truth and beauty, in an attempt to sell a time-share, or lipstick, or God. In the beginning of the creation narrative, God is first seen as the Creator. When he names the crown of his creation, and declares that we bear his image, he is defining us as being creative at the very core of our humanity. Are we created for more than just sales? How do beauty, truth and goodness inform the way we engage with our world?
When language becomes brittle, when tradition becomes rote, when imagination shrinks, when our ability to laugh atrophies, when the wonder at the strangeness of life—and things like lizards—begins to evaporate, we become foolish. We allow our creativity to be twisted by fear. We lose our courage to play and discover ourselves as participants in a larger story. G.K. Chesterton says that we have grown old; Jesus calls toward the fear-filled masses to have faith like a child. How else without maintaining faculties limbered by this faith can we remember how to create? To worship? To live? To love?
It is in these questions that Via Affirmativa was born. It began as four friends wrestling with the narrow definition of beauty and art found in much of Protestant Christianity. In the spring of 2005 the group expanded to twelve men and women who gathered for three days to dive further into these questions, and to move into what it meant to be a catalyst for cultural change. Why was sub-cultural art so often driven by a didactic message, rather than a response to the mystery the three transcendentals provokes, and the pain of living life outside the garden? Why was artistic excellence being trumped by didacticism? What sort of encouragement needed to be offered in order for artists, writers and thinkers to find freedom to pursue excellence, bringing their questions into the larger contexts of culture and art?
Every culture is defined by how they have engaged with questions surrounding the nature of goodness, beauty and truth. They enter into a global conversation that through history has been shaped by how artists of all types envisioned and re-visioned their worlds. The role of art and the artist is to reflect this world with passionate honesty, to see what truly is, and to imagine what might be. We do not live as those who have no hope; neither do we pretend that hope is easily obtained. The message that began with Jesus is that redemption is possible—indeed, that it is near.
The name, Via Affirmativa, means the way of affirmation. We seek to affirm artists and all who we encounter to live with redemptive creativity. This is an inherently lonely journey, one for which community is indispensable. We need each other to be reminded of the sacramental nature of all of life; there is no dividing line between what is “sacred” and what is “secular.” As we journey into chaos and noise that fills this world, we believe that we are called to see penetratingly both what is and what is possible, and speak artistically into the yet-uncreated world that might be.