From left to right: composer Elliott Carter, painter Mark Rothko, Dr. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of museum collections at the Museum of Modern Art, playwright Tennessee Williams and poet Stanley Kunitz, stand with their Brandeis University 1965 Creative Arts awards, prior to the award ceremony in New York, March 28, 1965. (AP Photo/John Lindsay)
In twenty-five years of writing the Daily Article, I have never begun by asking you to click on a link, but I’ll do so today. A painting by Mark Rothko just sold at auction for $37.8 million. Please take just a moment to look at it, then we’ll proceed.
With all due respect to Mr. Rothko, do you wonder if you could have painted this yourself? Perhaps that’s the point.
When I taught philosophy of religion at various seminaries, I always included a section on art history in the belief that artists reveal our culture to us in ways we often cannot see otherwise. Rothko is Exhibit A.
The Russian-born painter emigrated to the US in 1913 at the age of ten. His father’s death a few months later left the family without financial support and led Rothko to sever ties with his Jewish religion. Fluent in four languages, he was a brilliant though erratic student who viewed art as a vehicle for emotional and religious self-expression.
In his lifetime, he experienced the Great Depression, faced antisemitism, and lived through two world wars and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s emphasis on the tragedy and emptiness of life, the dark colors and abstract expressionism of his later work focused on transcending the individual and an almost mystical sense of the unknown.
Long preoccupied with darkness, death, and mortality, Rothko died by suicide in 1970.
When you look at the painting that just sold at auction, you see and feel what you bring to the painting, not what it brings to you. It is but a window permitting and even inviting you into your inner self. You discover the meaning that exists and, in a sense, are “painting” the painting yourself.
And that, Rothko wants us to believe, is the only meaning there is.
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According to Jean-Paul Sartre, “Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.” Millions of other existentialists and people who have never read him nonetheless agree. It is conventional wisdom today that truth is personal and subjective, that there are no absolute truths (which is an absolute truth claim), and that we are free (or condemned) to find our own purpose in this world.
The good news is that a new generation is coming to see this deception for the lie it is.
At a time when the American dream of affluence is falling apart, when Americans trust each other less and many do not know their neighbors, when we feel as untethered as an astronaut floating in space and struggle from chronic stress so viscerally that some adults are now sleeping with stuffed animals, many young adults are choosing a different path.
According to a Free Press profile, “zoomers” (adults under thirty years of age) are “quitting the rat race, skipping the $8 lattes, and buying homes in towns you’ve never heard of.” In choosing family over career, many are leaving cities for smaller communities and rural living.
They know what happiness research has resoundingly concluded: healthy relationships are the key to flourishing. Billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett could have told us this long ago. He still lives in the same Omaha house he purchased in 1958, calling it the third-best investment he’s ever made. The top two? His and his wife’s wedding rings.
“Gen Z is finding religion”
What young Americans are learning about meaning in life is turning many toward the Lord.
While secularism has been on the rise among younger generations for some time, we are now seeing a religious resurgence among young men, religious revivals on college campuses, and more students than ever reading the Bible. Newsweek reports a surprising rise in religiosity in their generation, along with a decline in secularism, while Vox headlines, “Gen Z is finding religion.”
Even Silicon Valley, long a bastion of millennial secularism, is witnessing a spiritual revival of surprising proportions.
None of this should surprise us. One way the Lord redeems the brokenness of our fallen world is by allowing it to show us the darkness of the human condition without Christ and resulting need for light beyond ourselves. After decades of sexual “liberation” and the plague of pornography, adultery, and broken homes it has produced, many want a better way.
Abby Laub is director of communications at Asbury University, the site of a sixteen-day, around-the-clock worship service that drew fifty thousand visitors and included students from over two hundred schools. She explained: “If you look at the world, and you look at what is going on and what Gen Z is facing, I just think they are absolutely desperate for something other than what the world is giving them right now.”
Popular atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens assured us that we don’t need God to live with meaning and purpose, but the consequences of their influence are proving them wrong. From the nihilism of abortion to the hopelessness of euthanasia, a society that commodifies and commercializes life is finding death in its place.
Mark Rothko’s art, especially his later work, is popular in large part because it holds a mirror to the bleakness and hopelessness of the culture that drove him to despair. Now it’s our turn to offer that culture a better way.
“If Jesus did it for me, he’ll do it for you”
My fear for Gen Z is that they will turn to religion about Jesus rather than experiencing a transforming relationship with him. Having faith in faith is nothing new; “the demons also believe, and shudder” (James 2:19 NASB).
As I noted yesterday, Jesus intends to make us not just better people but new people. Yet embracing the new requires us to release the old. Confessing and repenting from sin is essential to being forgiven for it. Admitting we need the transformation only Christ can make and then drawing closer to him through regular Bible study, prayer, worship, and obedience takes time and discipline.
If Gen Z and other Americans are to pay the price of transforming Christianity, you and I must lead the way. When we choose to obey our Father, his Spirit makes us like his Son (Romans 8:28). As we submit to his Spirit and live with holistic holiness (Ephesians 5:18), we become the “light of the world” amid the darkness of our day (Matthew 5:13–16). And as I often say, the darker the room, the stronger and more attractive the light.
I passed a church sign recently that declared, “If Jesus did it for me, he’ll do it for you.”
What has Jesus done for you lately?
Quote for the day:
“The Bible was not given for our information but for our transformation.” —Dwight L. Moody
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